morality and art 2

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Art and MoralityAuthor(s): James LaingSource: International Journal of Ethics,Vol. 14, No. 1 (ct., 1!"#), $$. %%&''

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ART AND MORALITY.

IT goes without saying, that it is impossible within the limitsof an article, to deal exhaustively with the relations of

Ethic and Aesthetic. An entirely adequate discussion of the subject could be accomplished only by a thorough

examination of the question as to whether there be an essential connection between the human instinct that finds

expression in strictly moral phe-nomena, and that which reflects itself in the forms of Art. We should, of course, have

to examine and settle the difficult prob-lem as to the precise sphere of Aesthetic properly so called, and to say whether

and how far Art, by its nature, is essentially a mode for the manifestation of moral ideas and aspirations; we should

have to decide whether there be a Good outside of the Beautiful, or a Beautiful outside of the Good.

But approaching the subject from a somewhat popular stand-point and making the very simple assumption that

Aesthetic and Moral or Social phenomena are essentially modes of spirit-ual manifestation, one may endeavor to

show that the Art impulse, when it has issued in Creation, as opposed to mere Imitation, has been, in one or two

strongly marked phases of social development, a correct and accurate exponent of the moral movement of the period

to which it belongs.

Spirit, from time to time in human history, has set its seal upon Nature in the form of Art. How far has the impress

been morally significant?Want of definiteness is the characteristic of all primitive forms of spiritual expression. Necessarily it is in the

domain of Art that the earliest record of this want is left for posterity to read. Long ere poetry, politics, religion, have

found ade-quate media, through which the thought they contain may live as history, the creative instinct has found

means to imprint upon the world imperishable traces of the results of its activity. Through these, and often through

these alone, can future ages guess at the poetic, the social, the political and the religious ideas that moulded and

mastered the development of prehis-toric man.

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56 International Journal of Ethics.


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ethical phenomena manifested by the history of their descend-ants,

as that history is reflected for example in such a writer as

Hlerodotus, we find that Art, however inarticulate, was a very fair

reflection of such moral instincts as were yet awake. Lofty enoughconceptions of the value and dignity of law and order, of reverence

for authority human and Divine, for age and wis-dom and genius,

of submission to fate, of the need for propiti-ating offended deities

by sacrifice and ritual, sometimes an exaggerated humaneness,

sometimes a superstitious recognition of the sanctity of human life,-

all this often consisting with the most chaotic disregard of

individual moral relations, the most monstrous sexuality and the

most revolting cruelty. Mor-ality like Art is here purposeless,

inarticulate. It is impossible to deny the existence of an ethical

consciousness, but the half articulate voice of moral obligation is

drowned in the clash of the cymbals that accompanies a mere

quantitative atonement for moral failures, just as the bright grace

of the Spirit of Beauty is quenched amid the awful gloom of the

Temple, or killed by the ugly mass of the pyramid.

In one aspect of ancient Art, however, there is both ethical and

artistic possibility. In the idea of the Sphinx, the spirit of the

ancient world found a partial articulation. Here the struggle with

nature is most manifest, here where victory and defeat so strangely

mingle. The divine womanhood of the head and bust, the

contemplative power of the broad mas-sive brow, the soul of

eternity that sleeps in the calm wakeful-ness of the eyes, the depthof emotion wedded to indomitable will in the full firm lips, and

below all this, and supporting it, and linked with it as indissoluble

part of one organism, the lion's body with its virile force of muscle

in shoulder and thigh and haunch,-such are the elements in this,

the most marvel-ous aesthetic conception of the genius of antiquity.

What need is there to point out the ethical import of such a

conception or to show that here a moral consciousness strug-gles,

not altogether in vain, to give birth to the very deepest of moral

ideas?

It is the dualism of Nature and Spirit, the eternal war of the

actual and the ideal of the moral life. To a later age of Art

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was left the task of disclosing the inherent inadequacy of the half

beast, half human creation, to express, with a clear articu-lateness,

the conflict of matter and mind; an age which, in the complete

human form, should find the balance of the antithesis, and in

finding it should lose it and itself be lost in the growing light of itsown thought, no less than in the darkness of its extinction by a

world conquering alien. In Barbaric Art and in Barbaric Ethics,

Spirit was inarticulate because it could not find in matter an

adequate medium for its expression. It is to the sculpture of Greece

and to the thought and life of Athens in the age of Pericles that we

must go for the records of a race who gloried in finding such a

medium, and who paid the pen-alty of believing that its adequacywas permanent.

In Athenian Art and in Athenian Society and Politics, we find an

atmosphere illumined by the light of self-conscious de-finiteness.

Freedom in order, liberty under law, thought cloth-ing itself infinite

embodiment and for the time unconscious of its limitation, finding

indeed in the idea of limit the fullest ex-pression of its highest aims

and aspirations,-such were some of the characteristic springs of the

Greek life at its loftiest reach of achievement. Spirit seemed to have

lost, in the pliancy of matter, the sense of Infinitude; matter seemed

to have be-come instinct with all spiritual possibility. Did

intelligence ever conceive of any form in which more truly and

simply dwells the soul of an Infinite Beauty than in the rhythmic

curves of the Theseus? Before the most time mutilated remains of

that age, we breathe the air not of the studio but of the shrine: any

sense of admiration at the rare possibilities of skill of hand andbrain is instinctively checked as a profaneness, and we all but

believe that a marble bosom did heave into glowing life beneath the

last loving touches of Pygmalion's chisel.

Turn where you will amid the surviving fragments of the

creative energy of the Greek imagination, you find the same

marvelous idealization of matter, the same conviction that the hardrind of Nature has for once been broken through, that Nature has

given up its foreignness and willingly yielded to the interpretative

insight of Art; that man has risen clear of the brute; that the

human form is, even to the eye of sense, divine.


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The ideas thus reflected in this golden age of plastic Art were

precisely the ideas that moulded the social life of Athens. To make

the life of its citizens free, happy, beautiful, pur-poseful, naturally

artistic, as well as artistically natural, was the aim of the loftyleading spirits whom the genius of the Greek life inspired. The

actual of that life came so near to the ideal, that that aim was all

but realized. The self-conscious-ness of that realization constituted

at once the serene sunlight of the Attic Spirit and the darkness of

the Fate in which ere long it was swallowed up.

The artistic and the ethical ideals were, as if for a moment, one.

Art reflected life and educated it; the moral impulse found in Art

its truest and fullest expression, until the idea of "Art for Art"

became an ethical as well as an aesthetic aspira-tion, destroying the

deepest life of the former, and depriving Art of its moral

significance. Why, it has often been asked, did Greek Morality

degenerate most, precisely at the moment when Greek Art

achieved its noblest triumphs? The question has been variously

answered; doubtless there must be various elements in the answer.

When Socrates says that Ethics, to be truly such, must be

purposeful, self-conscious, he indicates the source of the moral

weakness of the spirit of his time.

So long as the ideal of the State was a vital thing for the in-

dividual citizen, so long as the Athenian cultivated his body and

exercised his intelligence in the service of the Genius of his City, he

escaped the worst consequences of that exclusive-ness which theSociety of the City enforced. Till then he could be socially self-

denying, publicly brave and privately honorable and virtuous,

according to his ideas of honor and virtue. But, with the dawn of

the ambition, begotten of the age of Pericles, to make the individual

life under the strong underlying aes-thetic impulse of the Athenian

spirit, a work of art, came the end of the Greek Ethics and the

degradation of the Greek Art. To aim at the acquirement of beauty,

physical and moral, with a view not to the service of Athene but to

individual self-com-placence and individual blessedness, to strive

after a statuesque completeness in the individual life, with only the

vaguest refer-ence to a correspondingly increased value in the

aggregate of


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social relations, this was the fatal moral mistake of the philo-

sophically grounded life of the most perfect of ancient com-

munities. In the course of the development of such a mistake, it was

but natural that the State, less and less an object of de-votion,

should lose its cohesiveness and cease to be. In the sphere of Art,

the like degeneracy was not less real because it is more difficult to

trace. It is true that public spirit, patriotism, glad, or at the lowest

ungrudging self-sacrifice to duty, clear-ness of moral discernment,

the fidelity of friendship, the sancti-ty of domestic relations, that

these had vanished as facts of po-litical and social life, long ere the

bloom was shed or even the fair bud had fully unfolded itself in the

flower of Greek crea-tive Art. That flower derived its quality from aroot and soil to which the glorious past of Athens had most largely

contrib-uted. The growth of the Greek idea, especially in its

degener-acy, was characterized by a rapidity unexampled in

history. Hence the Art of its last days, that is the noblest forms of

that Art did not strictly belong to the short and fleeting epoch in

which it appeared, save perhaps in a certain self-conscious pride of

technique, which is not altogether undiscernible even in the very

purest of its creations. Whatever exception we must here allow to

the general principle that the results of the creative impulse

correctly reflect the ethical life of the time, must be grounded upon

the unique swiftness of the Athenian social development, upon the

wide application of the words, "Ars longa vita brevis" and upon the

fact proved by all history that the highest products of thought and

imagination are often reaped in periods of incipient national and

social decay. Yet speaking broadly, the defects' of the ethical

conceptions of Greece were essentially the defects of her Art. The

Greek State, like the Greek religion of which its Art was the

nominal exponent, was based upon a doctrine of natural selection.

It rested upon the belief, practical at once and theoretic, that the

choice specimens of mankind alone should inherit the earth. It

lifted some human qualities into the Divine, but not hu-manity as

such. It found no place or voice for the infinite pa-thos that gives tomodern Morality and Art of the highest types whatever of value or

permanence or beauty they possess. It


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found no expression for the wail of the slave or the claim to

compassion of the physically, morally, or intellectually weak. It cast

out from it all shapes of deformity, or misery, or mis-fortune, as an

ugliness, which its refined ethical and artistic taste could neitheruse nor tolerate. Hence, beyond all the sun-light of an ideal life of

healthy practical energy and contem-plative thought, there loomed

ever the shadow of that fate, which, in the natural and necessary

philanthropic reaction that preceded the assault of Rome upon its

effete political life, wrapped Athens in the gloom in which so soon

its exclusive freedom and its creative power were lost. The idea

"Art for Art" consoling motto of the Greeks, who, when theircountry was enslaved, set up their studios in the Imperial City and

amid the luxury of the voluptuous towns of the Campanian Coast,

was neither new nor strange. We have said that it is difficult to

connect the moral degeneracy of the most splendid phase of

Athenian life with the noblest creative achievements which were

contemporary with that degeneracy. It is not so difficult on a wide

familiarity with some even of the most exquisite productions of

Athenian Art. One of the most renowned works of the chisel of

Praxiteles is the Aphrodite of Cnidos. No goddess more truly

influenced the society of Ath-ens in her hour of most unquestioned

supremacy. No altar was more duly honored by public offering or

by private rite. No deity was ever more really worshipped in spirit

and in truth. And, as he bowed before the shrine, the Athenian

devotee paid his vows and presented his gifts, and poured out his

prayers, to the idealized image of the most noted beauty and themost notorious profligate of the age. Phyrne, the courtesan for

whose bought smile and favors the young noblesse of the city

contended, had served as model to Praxiteles, mightiest master of

Athenian Sculpture at its best.

It was the belief in the ideal of the State as conceived by theGreek mind and all but realized in the Greek life, that de-stroyed

the moral possibilities of Greece; it was the aesthetic faith that

found in the sensuous perfectness of the human form an adequate

medium for spiritual expression, that killed Athenian Art.


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Space does not permit us to follow through decadence to death

the future progress of either. The spiritual atmosphere of earlier

imperial Rome is not healthy either for the student of Ethics or the

student of Art; an atmosphere of more than half insane sensuality

and cruelty. The grossness of morals and the prostitution of Art are

reflected with a fearful clearness iii those sculptures and sketches

from Pompeii, collected in amuseum at Naples, which women are

not allowed to enter.

In Rome the Greek Art found its grave; but in Rome also the Art

spirit had its resurrection as reflector at once and teacher of a new

ethic and a new life.

Amid the vilest travesties of the speculative Greek Morality inits epicurean phase, there lived and grew the stoic ideal, which,

with all its narrowness of conception, still contained the germ of an

infinite Ethical possibility. To the latter it was given to speak the

last word of the old world both for Art and Ethics, and

unconsciously to announce the advent of a new era for both.

The moral ideal of the earlier Roman Stoics revolted from Art.

It wanted the touch of emotion to make it a religion, whose

universal aspiration should recognize and include uni-versal needs.

It was doubtless a preparation for Christian Art and Morality, but

it is difficult to see how these could ever have been evolved from it.

It felt the pathos of human life, but in its essential and practical

pessimism it contained no idea of an optimism on the basis of

pessimism, such as constituted the very deepest truth of

Christianity. Its highest outlook was towards the dim suggestion of

a life beyond the grave, "


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theses and its play of passion, was to combine the universalis-tic

ideal of the Stoic with a purified enthusiasm for that beauty which

the Stoic despised.

Passing over the attractive field of inquiry, that would invite toan attempt to trace the development of the new birth of Art and

Morals which belongs to the early Christian centuries, the

emergence above ground from the catacombs of the Christian

Spirit and its evolution as manifested in the Roman, the By-zantine,

the Lombard, and the Gothic Architecture and Sculp-ture, let it

suffice to glance at that form of Art which most distinctively

belongs to Christianity-Painting, and at the moral life whichcorresponded with it. In Christianity Spirit never found its

adequate expression in Art; even from the first the moral ideal

transcended full infinite manifestation; it could be no longer

expressed through matter: Barbaric inarticulate-ness and Classic

balance alike lay behind it; it did indeed take up into self the

artistic impulse, in so far as form and color were concerned, and

use it for its own high ends, but in so do-ing it glorified, exalted,

transfigured, satisfied, it until, like the Greek Morality, it lost it,

though unlike the Greek Morality it survived the loss.

In the perfection of pictorial Art under the Christian im-pulse,

we have, of course, the reflection of some of the deepest ethical

truths of which Christianity was the source. Under our present

limits a glance at one or two outstanding features must suffice.

One of the central ideas of this Age of Art was the Madon-na.

This was perhaps the greatest ethical, as it was the great-est

esthetic conception of the Middle Ages. In Classical Art it has no

counterpart. Jetvov -o ore'xireelea-ev,says Sopho-cles, but the idea is

a mere casual reflection. The divinity of Motherhood simply did

not influence practically the Athenian life or the Athenian Art.

In the moral culture, the moral regeneration of Christen-dom,

what force has played a more, resultful part? In the Magdalene, the

divinity of Repentance found its earliest utter-ance, a conception

which was or would have been most as-suredly "foolishness" to the

Greek philosophic mind, even


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under its deepest and truest moral mood. To trace the power of

these two artistic, as well as religious creations, to the uni-versal

popularity of female deities in every age, as shown in the worship

of Diana, Astarte, or Isis, is not only to rationalize Christianity; it is

to miss the ethical import of the most es-sential of its ideas. In the

Christ of Mediaeval Painting, the divinity of Sorrow and the worth

of Man as Man give the full-est expression to the spirit of Stoicism,

while they add to that spirit the element of passion, without which

abstract self-re-nunciation, no less than abstract universalism,

could never fas-cinate or renovate mankind. It was not the Greek

idea of God in the image of man, it was no apotheosis of the rarest

intellec-tual and physical human beauty; no artificial divinehumanity formed by the palaestra and the School, with eyes that

had looked on no ugliness and ears which discordance had never

entered. It was a figure whose humanity had been worn and spent

in service, and whose divinity had become perfect through

suffering.

The forms of an Art like this, so long as it was true to itself, werenever self-consciously adequate to the ideas that inspired it. It was

an Aesthetic Age, in which "Art for Art" was never a motive;

whose half unconscious motto was "Art for Re-ligion," when

Religion and Morality were one. In its noblest remains we are

invariably struck by the mighty force of one idea; there is no

slovenly slurring of details, yet there is no self-complacent pride of

technique; while, from the ethical point of view, we are taught

without being lectured, and our aesthetic enjoyment is seldom if

ever less, because it is the ve-hide of moral teaching. The greatest

religious painters, per-haps, never painted in order to teach, yet the

essence of the purest Ethics of their time was most unquestionably

very largely inspired by their work. Paradoxical though at first

sight it seems, it is just as unquestionable that, in the deca-dence of

the sixteenth century, the dawn of the idea of "Art for Art" was

precisely the point at which Art and Morals ceased to have anessential connection.

The growth of Pictorial Art in the service of the Church

corresponded with a broadening ethical outlook. More than


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any other agent it unfolded to the world the universalism which

only half consciously inspired it. The abstract form in Sculp-ture

tended to stereotype the ideas it expressed. In Painting, the

principles of shadow and perspective formed the elements of aninfinite progress, while they interpreted the pathos and the

universality of the Christian conceptions of Humanity and of

Moral relation. The inadequacy of Painting, even for ten-tative

spiritual expression, disclosed itself just before the Ref-ormation.

Art lost its simplicity, its subordination of detail, its independence

of technique, its reverence, its spirituality of conception, its purity

of execution. Hence, it gave up Crea-tion for imitation, lovinginterpretation for sensuous idolatry, spirit for sense and freedom

for license. It ceased to lend itself to the display of religious facts,

and then and thereafter, as Ruskin says, "religious facts were

employed for the display of Art," and by a gradual process Art

degenerated, through the sensuousness of realistic flesh color, until

it came to revel at last in the clever realism of technique displayed

by the still life and domesticity of the Dutch School. "Ye have made

the Virgin," says Savonarola to the painters of Florence, "Ye have

made the Virgin to appear like a prostitute." What wonder that the

Church of the Reformation disdained the Sisterhood of Art? The

Reformation could not come while a genuine ar-tistic impulse

promoted a pure worship and a lofty morality. It had to come when

sensuousness took the place of aspiration, and spiritual adoration

was exchanged for idolatry. The suc-cess of Medieval Art was

unquestionably owing to the fact that genius was nourished in theatmosphere of a passionate social purity. When that atmosphere

became contaminated, scenic Art could be no longer the essential

handmaid of re-ligion.

It is unnecessary, perhaps, to discuss at length the relation of

Art and Ethics after the Renaissance and the Reformation, for it isin Music and in Poetry, rather than in the Plastic or Pictorial

spheres of Art, that that relation is most clearly seen. The moral

movement of post-Reformation society is, of course, from age to

age, reflected in the portrait and the landscape, as well as in the

spirit of the periodic modernizing

Vol. XIV-No.i 5


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or imitation of pagan Models; yet these are but accidental re-

flections; they are not the creative impress of an ethical im-pulse.

One instance of such an impress under such an impulse, we

select in closing from the history of four centuries: one of the most

obvious and one of the most suggestive. The social earthquake of

the French Revolution had no concomitant and no result more

significant for the Aesthetic or the Moral in-tcrests of mankind

than the rise of that movement of thought of which Goethe and

Wordsworth were the most outstanding exponents. In wide

diversity of manner and form, yet with a perfect oneness in spirit

and in originality, they expressed an idea which all the glory ofMediaeval Art at its highest point failed to reach. For the noblest

thought of Leonardo, of Pe-rugino, of Raphael, was the mystic

union of Earth and Heaven; to the poetic spirit of the nineteenth

century it was given to grasp and realize the deeper conception of

the Eternal and Essential unity of the Human and the Divine.

JAMES LAING.

DYSART, SCOTLAND.

RELIGION AS AN IDEA.'

RECENTphilosophical literature presents, among other

note-worthy features, a peculiar handling of the subject ofrelig-ion. This peculiarity in treatment may be described as a

more or less conscious commingling, even confusion, of

elements. On the one hand, writers are concerned to make

plain the bio-logical and sociological function of religion and

they give defi-nitions accordingly:

"Religion is a substitute in the rational world for instinct in the sub-rational world."'

1 The -writer of this paper wishes to call attention to the fact that he is not

concerned to establish any form of faith but simply to inquire whether the term

"religion" does not demand a more exact connotation than is given it in recent

discussions.

2 Lester F. Ward: Article. "Essential Nature of Religion."


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